Synesthesia? What’s That?

Ever since I was little — I guess ever since I knew letters and numbers — they each had a color when I pictured them. For example, S and 6 were always yellow, E green, 7 brown, L and O white with black outlining. And the days of the week had colors too: Tuesday was yellow, Wednesday green, Thursday purple, and Saturday, also yellow.

I never really thought anything of it; I assumed everyone saw the same thing.

Within the last year or so, I vaguely remember reading something about seeing numbers and letters as different colors. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I said to myself, “Oh, so it is a real thing and not everyone can see it.” And I quickly forgot about it.

A few weeks ago, I saw a book on the New Books rack at the local library. I am a book fanatic, and even though I have plenty of books on my shelves, I can’t go to the library without getting a book. It was a novel called Tuesday Nights in 1980. It is about an art critic with synesthesia. He sees and even smells things associated with paintings. The book contained some information about synesthesia in the introduction, and I then started to do some research. I don’t know any other synesthetes, so please let me know if you are one.

Synesthesia is a sort of crossing over of one sense into another. There are many different types. One of the more common forms is the type I have, known as grapheme-color synesthesia, where letters and/or numbers are perceived as colored. Although they always appear pretty much the same color to the same synesthete, the colors are not universal among different people. For example, I see 6 as yellow, but someone else might always see it as blue. However, studies have found that sometimes synesthetes see the same color for a letter or number; for example, A is usually red.

Generally, this “condition” lasts throughout someone’s lifetime. The colors I see seemed to have faded throughout the years, but many are still there. And not every number or letter has to have a color associated with it.

It is likely that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are learning abstract concepts for the first time. Grapheme-color synesthesia develops when children start to identify letters and numbers.

As with me, synesthetes are unaware their experiences are unusual until they realize other people don’t have them. Most synesthetes report that their experiences are pleasant or neutral, although, infrequently, people complain that their synesthesia leads to “sensory overload.”

Although it is labeled as a neurological condition, many of us consider our synesthesia as a gift rather than as a handicap. Synesthetes often use their special abilities to memorize things, do mental arithmetic, etc. Many of us are involved in creative activities.

Years ago (synesthesia was noticed as far back as the 1800s), it was thought that synesthesia occurred in maybe 1 in 20,000 people, but now it is thought that as many as 1 in 23 people may have some form of it. And there are many forms in addition to grapheme-color:

Tone → (color, movement) synesthesia: People see colors when they hear certain tones of music.

Spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia: Numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week appear in precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990 or 5 may be to the left of 2), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise).

Auditory-tactile synesthesia: Certain sounds can produce sensations in parts of the body. A specific word might feel like a touch in a specific part of the body. This is one of the least common forms of synesthesia.

Ordinal-linguistic personification: Ordered sequences, such as numbers, days of the week, months of the year, or the alphabet are associated with personalities and/or genders. For example, the number 7 could be a teenage girl with an attitude, or the letter M might be little boy who is whining all the time.

Mirror-touch synesthesia: A rare form of synesthesia where individuals feel the same sensation that another person feels (such as touch).

Lexical-gustatory synesthesia: A rare form of synesthesia where certain tastes are experienced when hearing words. For example, the word automobile might taste like chocolate. I often felt that the number 4 smelled like paint, so I don’t know what that’s all about!

Spatio-temporal synesthesia: A mental map of days, weeks, and/or months, where people say that they can “see the time,”for example, as a ring or circle.

So what causes synesthesia? It is thought to be increased cross-talk between brain regions specializing in different functions. For example, the experience of seeing color when looking at numbers and letters might be due to cross-activation of the grapheme-recognition and the color areas of the brain.

A study found that synesthesia is found in 4.4% of the population, 1 in 23 people. According to that same study graphemes-color synesthesia if found in one percent of the population. There is also research to suggest that the likelihood of having synesthesia is greater in people with autism.

So what creative people whom you might know have synesthesia?

The artist Kandinsky

The author Nabokov

The artist David Hockney

The musician/composer Duke Ellington

The composer Rimsky-Korsakov

Musician Billy Joel

Violinist Itzhak Perlman

Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead

Happy Pharrell Williams

Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, who experiences colors as scents

I would love to hear from you if you are a synesthete. I believe there is a national organization for us – which I don’t belong to, since I just found out I am one!

Comments

As a youngster, my mind analyzed tone intervals. I could identify cars by the horn tones. (Couldn’t bear the Cadillac triad) Mastered the piano by listening to records. Played for a Yale School of Music Professor who had no idea that I couldn’t read music, but played by tonal relationship, and was startled when he encouraged to apply to the school. The ear-training placement test was aced by only three students, two with perfect pitch and me. The rest had to take ear-training, and all flunked it the first year. No one at the school ever discovered that I couldn’t read music.
My daughter inherited whatever it is that I have. She could match a tone at 6 weeks 3 days old. When she could crawl, she crawled over to the grand piano, pulled herself up on the leg, worked her way to the center, and over her head, hanging onto the keyboard with her left hand, she played Mary Had A Little Lamb with her right hand. Like me, she cannot read music. PS, her band does New Years Eve at Guantanamo Bay.

Now that is an interesting story! I wish I had that talent. I have been struggling with piano for decades! I don’t know if that is a form of synesthesia, but it sounds as if you have perfect pitch, or just real music talent. Thank you for sharing that.

No, it’s not perfect pitch. That’s why I said “two with perfect pitch and me.” When I hear a song, I not only see a pattern in in the melody, but I see a pattern in the chord progression. This means that I can then go over to the piano and play it. If you know that pattern, you can play it in any key and on any instrument. It’s not the pitch, i t’s the pattern. There is a form that shows up in my mind, and I see what I hear on this form. It is complicated to explain, as I “see” it both horizontally and vertically. I never thought about this until I read your article.
A few years ago, I was analyzing a song in my sleep. I awoke to a TV movie and the woman was just finishing up accompanying herself on this tune. It was a busy day, but the tune so flooded my mind, I HAD to stop everything and play it on the piano. It took months to find out the name of the song and the name of the movie. (In A Lonely Place w/Humphrey Bogart)
My daughter told me only recently that in High School, when her friends called her up, she’d play a trick on them. She’d have them press the numbers on the early button phone one by one as she listened, then have them play any number, and she’d call it. They thought she was psychic. It seems that each number has its own ‘configuration’ that she ‘sees’ and memorizes, then she can call the numbers as she hears the picture of it.

I would think, then, that it is a form of synesthesia if you see music! Very cool. I wish I could see patterns in chord progressions! I can usually sort of see a melody, but I don’t think mine is anything special, although there are people who hear a melody and cannot figure it out by the ups and downs of the sounds.

Don’t know if I’d be considered to have synesthesia — but I associate the states (on a map) with certain colors. As a child, I learned the (then) 48 state names, their capital cities, and could complete a “puzzle” map of the United States very quickly — all when I was about 3 years old. (My older sister took me to “show and tell” with my map-puzzle…)

Side fact: The map-puzzle was all made out of wood, and was actually a rather nicely made “toy.”

Years later, I realized that a map–puzzle I saw didn’t look right … because the colors used were “wrong”!

(FWIW, California was red, Montana brown, Idaho red, Oregon blue, Washington (state) green, etc. It’s been nearly 70 years since I learned that map and I have forgotten most of the colors associated with the states — and we picked up a couple more states, too…)

I am no expert on this, but if you memorized the actual colors that were on that map puzzle, it is not synesthesia. It isn’t a case of memorizing anything that exists. It is seeing colors where none exist. So if the map ha no colors, but you saw colors, then it would be synesthesia. But you have an awfully good memory!

Many times we talk about grammar in terms of writing. This blog post is about speaking. We don’t need to worry about punctuation when we speak, but we do have to worry about grammar—and pronunciation (which we don’t have to worry about when we write).

A while ago, one of my readers asked me to write a post about my life as a self-publisher. However, before I became a self-publisher (or “indie” publisher, as we like to call it), I was a writer for a very long time. I think most people who write have been writing for most of their lives.